ANTOR leverages the media
ANTOR, the Association of National Tourism Office Representatives, continued their excellent series of seminars last evening with a highly topical, “Leveraging the Media” session at Sydney’s Four Points Sheraton Darling Harbour.
Attendees at the seminar included representatives from the leading NTO’s, tour operators, wholesalers, airlines, media and PR companies and the panel consisted of an illustrious group of consumer media, including Stephen Samuelson, from the Sydney Morning Herald On Line, Pamela Wright, well know travel journalist, Anthony Dennis of Travel and Leisure, Marc Llewellyn, well know travel journalist, Neville Passmore and Richard Morant from the Garden Gurus and Diana Plater from AAP.
Unfortunately there were no trade media on the panel – perhaps they should have invited The Mole!
The message was clear in that the industry needs to do more to provide accurate, timely and relevant information to the media and in a form that is required and needed, for example the requirements of on line media are very different to print and the requirements of news outlet are very different to that of a features outlet.
Good and bad media fam trips were explored and the media knowing which will be the good ones and which the bad ones, which they steer away from. By the way good ones are not ones that involve masses of lunches and parties, but ones that give the journo heaps of stories, hopefully and possibly exclusives and which they can write about for many months afterwards – also independent trips are highly favoured.
The power of the media was clear but there needs to be differentiation between what really should be paid advertising and pr or news as the media is not there to subside the marketing budgets and operations of the travel industry, the publications also needing advertising to survive.
Well done to Philip Thornily for organising as usual, an excellent event, but sadly Philip announced that it appears he may not be at the helm of ANTOR in the role of Executive Director any longer as the committee of ANTOR has decided to go to tender to seek an ED and Philip (probably quite rightly) is not responding to the tender.
John Alwyn-Jones, former President of ANTOR and Chairman and Managing Director of TravelMole said, ”Philip has been pretty well solely responsible since I employed him a number of years ago when I was with BTA, for pulling ANTOR up by its bootstraps to the very high status position it holds today.” “I can’t imagine what the committee is thinking about by not renewing his contract, perhaps they think they can get the services cheaper elsewhere ?” “Whatever, Philip will be a great loss to them”.
Thank you Philip from The Mole for your tremendous contribution to the industry during your role with ANTOR.
Report by The Mole
John Alwyn-Jones
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